Originally posted by Gustofer:I would submit that the 22nd Amendment "cure" was far better than the disease.

If it is good enough for the presidency it is certainly good enough for Congress.

Six terms in the House and two terms in the Senate. You're done. Get a real job.

Completely different situation.

Term limits has certainly worked in Whackyland!

Luckily, I have enough willpower to control the driving ambition that rages within me.

When you had the votes, we did things your way. Now, we have the votes and you will be doing things our way. This lesson in political reality from Lyndon B. Johnson

"Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible." - Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Originally posted by Gustofer:I would submit that the 22nd Amendment "cure" was far better than the disease.

If it is good enough for the presidency it is certainly good enough for Congress.

Six terms in the House and two terms in the Senate. You're done. Get a real job.

Completely different situation.

Term limits has certainly worked in Whackyland!

To be honest, Kommiefornia was circling the drain long before term limits.

My dad always claimed that 187 was a grave that the GOP dug for itself.

Something to think about.

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People again must learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. ~ Cicero 55 BC

POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2017 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN JUDICIAL NOMINEES, TRUMP ADMNINISTRATIONTRUMP HITS ANOTHER HOME RUN ON JUDGES

Whatever criticisms conservatives have of Donald Trump’s presidency to date, he has not disappointed at all when it comes to judicial nominations. Justice Gorusch is the most obvious example, but we can cite others, including the two nominees for the United States Courts of Appeals, Joan Larsen (Sixth Circuit) and Amy Barrett (Seventh Circuit), whose hearings occurred this week.

Today, the president hit another home run — indeed, I would say a grand slam — when he nominated Greg Katsas for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Our friend Shannen Coffin offers this summary of Katsas’ career:

quote:

Katsas, who currently serves as deputy White House counsel, has a legal résumé that would be difficult to match. An executive editor of the Harvard Law Review during his law-school years, Katsas clerked on the Third Circuit and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals. He then followed his then-boss Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, clerking for Justice Thomas in his first term on the high court.

Katsas then spent a decade in private practice for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., before joining the Justice Department in the early days of the George W. Bush administration. There, Greg oversaw the appellate section of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, where he argued dozens of the most challenging and important appeals facing the Bush administration — cases involving the defense of the homeland in the aftermath of September 11, challenges to the president’s prosecution of the war on terrorism, and the federal ban on partial-birth abortion, and many more cases involving critical constitutional principles.

Katsas served the entire eight years in the Bush administration, eventually being appointed as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division.

In both government and private practice, Katsas has argued cases before the Supreme Court — he was one of the lawyers who argued the landmark challenge to Obamacare in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius — and in every U.S. court of appeals. In all, he has argued more than 75 appeals.

Shannen worked closely with Katsas in the Bush Justice Department. He says of his former colleague:

quote:

Katsas has a temperament and work ethic that will make him a top-notch judge. Quite simply, nobody worked harder than Katsas at the Justice Department. I certainly didn’t; he was there when I got to work and at his desk when I headed home.

Every significant brief filed by the Civil Division in the courts of appeals, and there were a lot of them, bore his stamp. Over the years, I’ve told many a lawyer that there was no one better on the legal briefs — in both writing and legal analysis — than Katsas. And that is no faint praise, given that I have worked with some of the best lawyers of my generation.

As for his view of the law and the judiciary, this statement by Shannen echoes what I’ve heard from others whose judgment I also trust (I don’t know Katsas personally):

quote:

Most important, a Judge Katsas would have a consistent judicial philosophy, one in line with Trump’s promises. Katsas understands that the courts’ role is a simple one — to decide cases, not to dictate policy. Like Justice Gorsuch, with whom he worked closely at the Department of Justice, Katsas understands the critical role that constitutional and statutory text play in deciding those cases. And he recognizes the importance of the original understanding of the founders in interpreting that text. Judge Katsas will be a welcome addition to a court that was packed by with liberal jurists by President Obama.

You can find out more about Greg Katsas at this site that has been set up to assist in the confirmation battle.

And it will be a battle. The D.C. Circuit is America’s second most important court and Katsas’s approach to the law will not sit well with the left.

His opponents will make much of the fact that, as noted, he currently serves as deputy counsel to the president in the White House Counsel’s Office. Expect the left to use this as an excuse to find out what legal advice the White House Counsel’s Office has been providing the president. When the administration resists, as it should, on the grounds of privilege, expect this to become a pretext for obstructing and ultimately voting against this extraordinary well-qualified nominee.

Along the same lines, expect the Democrats to use the confirmation process to put the Trump administration’s legal team on trial. This will be just one of the scorched earth tactics we likely will see from Democrats, goaded on by left-wing interest groups.

The Democrats can be expected to oppose Katsas with unanimity or something very close to it. Thus, the GOP will not be able to afford more than one or two defectors (depending on Sen. McCain’s health).

I hope President Trump can avoid taking needless, alienating shots at Republican Senators long enough to get Greg Katsas confirmed.

Originally posted by parabellum:Dang, you watched 60 Minutes. I wouldn't be able to manage that.

In my defense, I watched Steve Bannon. I'd never heard him do an interview before. And not to put too fine a point on it, he could have easily been mistaken for a certain moderator of a certain forum telling a certain membership that Donald Trump doesn't need Charlie Rose's advice on how to run a campaign, or a Presidency.

EDIT: That was supposed to be a joke. Para was funnier in one line than I was in four.

I heard some clips this morning on talk radio of Bannon handling the smug Charlie Rose with ease on 60 Minutes, especially this back-and-forth:

quote:

CHARLIE ROSE: Does that mean he'll be more quote "presidential."

STEVE BANNON: I think-- by the way, I think-- when you say presidential I think he's very presidential.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK.

STEVE BANNON: OK-- OK, I think he's very presidential. This is one of the things he uses OK, he uses Twitter-- and not-- they used to call me, "Oh, you're the-- you're the enabler of the Twitter." I think what he does on Twitter is extraordinary. He disintermediates the media. He goes above their head and talks directly to the American people.

CHARLIE ROSE: It's not a question of going over the head of the American-- of-- over the head of the media, it's what he says.

STEVE BANNON: It's what he says. No, it's what he says that the mainstream media, the pearl-clutching mainstream media. The pearl-clutching mainstream media. What they deem is not correct, what they deem is not right.

CHARLIE ROSE: No, it's not a question--

STEVE BANNON: If you ask--

CHARLIE ROSE: --about right or not right.

STEVE BANNON: What you deem--

CHARLIE ROSE: It's not a question of appropriateness. It's--

STEVE BANNON: It's what you deem is--

CHARLIE ROSE: --it's a question of whether it's in his interest. That's the point. Not the appropriateness of it.

STEVE BANNON: OK, I don't think he needs-- the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and CBS News. And I don't believe he thinks that they're looking out what's in his best interest, OK? He's not gonna believe that, I don't believe that, and you don't believe that, OK? This is another just standard in judgment that you rain upon him in the effort to destroy Donald Trump. He knows he's speaking directly to the people who put him in office when he uses Twitter. And it sometimes is not in the custom and tradition of what the opposition party deems is appropriate. You're-- you're absolutely correct, it's not. And he's not gonna stop. And by the way, General Kelly, I have the most tremendous respect for and has put in very tight processes. He's not gonna be able to control it either because it's Donald Trump. It's Donald Trump talking directly to the American people. And to say something else, you're gonna get some good there. And every now and again you're gonna get some less good, OK? But you're just gonna have to live with it.

These friggin' bastards played games with the color saturation to make Bannon look "evil" though.

I only caught part of the interview but went back and watched the whole thing online.I was impressed.The only thing was his opinion that Comey should have not been fired ~ not because he didn't deserve it but because it would have been better for the Trump administration.I will have to think about that for a while.Overall I think he held his own and represented well.

Confirmation of the obvious: The Democrat Party's propaganda arm, the MSM, applies negative spin to everything relating to Trump. Trump has received more news coverage in his first 9 months in office than Obama did in his last two years in office, and 91% of all coverage of Trump is negative/adverse.

The press isn't trying to show us news, it's trying to undermine the Trump administration.

Note that the article includes many charts and graphs that quantify the MSM's sins, but you'll need to go to the URL to see them: LINK

The broadcast network evening newscasts remain as hostile as ever towards President Trump and his agenda, although the networks appear to be easing up on their obsessive wall-to-wall coverage of the administration.

Since Inauguration Day (January 20), Media Research Center analysts have reviewed every mention of President Trump and top administration officials on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, including weekends. As of August 31, coverage of the administration has totaled nearly 74 hours (4,418 minutes) of airtime, or about 39 percent of all evening news coverage.

For comparison purposes, coverage of the Obama administration in all of 2015 and 2016 totaled 59 hours (3,544 minutes), or roughly 10 percent of the available broadcast airtime. In other words, Trump has already received more coverage in his first 224 days in office than Obama received in his final two years as President.

Analyzing the networks’ spin makes it clear that the goal of all of this heavy coverage is not to promote the President, but to punish him. In June, July and August, broadcast evening news coverage of Trump was 91 percent negative — worse than the astounding 89 percent negative spin we calculated during the first three months of the administration, usually a traditional honeymoon period for new presidents.

Methodology: Our measure of spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of partisan politics. Thus, our analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump, Democrats criticizing him), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story, such as statements from experts presented as non-partisan, voters, or opinionated statements from the networks’ own reporters.

Using these criteria, MRC analysts tallied 1,567 evaluative statements about the Trump administration in June, July and August, of which 1,422 (91%) were negative vs. a mere 145 (9%) which were positive. Since Trump took office on January 20, there have been 4,144 such evaluative statements, of which 3,712 (90%) were negative, vs. 432 (10%) which were positive.

The networks’s aggressive anti-Trump spin has been constant throughout 2017, as it was during the presidential campaign last year. The closest the evening newscasts came to achieving balanced coverage was in April, when a few reporters and analysts praised the President’s use of cruise missiles to punish the Syrian regime for a chemical weapons attack. Yet network coverage that month was still skewed against Trump by a greater than four-to-one ratio (82% negative, vs. 18% positive).

The rate of TV coverage has been intense. Early in the year, the networks focused on the Trump presidency as if it were a national crisis, with White House news consuming almost half (49%) of all evening news airtime in January, February and March. That rate subsided in April and May (see chart), and has averaged 32 percent over the past three months — more than triple the rate of coverage of the last two years of the Obama administration (10%), but a significant decline compared to the earliest days of the administration.

It remains to be seen whether this drop in Trump presidential coverage is permanent, or merely reflects the traditional decline in political news during the summer months.

Four topics consumed more than half (53%) of all Trump news from June to August. The networks’ favorite topic was the ongoing Russia investigation, which consumed 415 minutes of airtime (27% of all Trump news) during the past three months. But the frenzied coverage of late spring has abated. In June, the three evening newscasts devoted 236 minutes to the probe; that fell to 140 minutes in July and just 40 minutes in August.

The failed attempt to repeal ObamaCare was the second-most frequent topic, with 176 minutes of coverage this summer. During these same months, Trump’s handling of the crisis with North Korea was the focus of 136 minutes of coverage, while his response to the violence in Charlottesville drew 97 minutes of coverage.

The Russia investigation was also the source of most of the negative comments about Team Trump — 322 negative vs. 21 positive statements, yielding a 94% bad press score. Evening news coverage of the effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare was just as negative as the President’s much-maligned statements about the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. There were slightly more negative statements about the GOP health care replacement bill (240) than the comments about Charlottesville (213), with virtually no positive statements on either topic, for a matching score of 97% bad press.

A key difference, of course, is that the ObamaCare coverage unfolded over the course of the spring and summer, while the Charlottesville coverage was contained in an intense week of coverage in mid-August.

There was far less media spin regarding President’s handling of the showdown with North Korea, with only 57 negative statements and nine positive ones, for an 86% bad press score. Most of the coverage has actually been neutral, with the negative press clustered around Trump’s “fire and fury” threat to the North in early August.

The networks’ aggression in covering Trump contrasts with their docile, often adoring coverage of President Obama. Both Presidents are, of course, highly controversial — the key difference is that Obama’s policies matched the liberal media’s preferences, while Trump’s agenda clearly clashes with the establishment media’s world view.

On Friday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin gave the game away when he admitted that Trump “will get good coverage, if he works with Democrats, for as far as the eye can see. It will produce more liberal policies, which a lot of people in the media like.” All Presidents deserve critical news coverage from time to time, but the relentlessly hostile coverage Trump has seen thus far is as much a reflection of the media’s ideological bias as anything else.

Has anyone noticed -- through the fog of Russia, James Comey, Charlottesville and now two monster hurricanes -- that the U.S. economy is booming faster than it has since the late Clinton years?

It is undeniable. In the last year of the Obama administration, the economy was decelerating, with a dismal 1.6 percent growth rate. The economy revved up to a 3 percent growth rate in the second quarter this year. And some recent estimates for third-quarter GDP indicate even brisker growth, around 3.4 percent.

It's easy to read too much into short-term trends, and, yes, they can turn on a dime. But the new bounce in the step of the economy is confirmed by many other indicators, almost all of which point straight North. The Dow Jones industrial average is up more than 3,000 points (starting with the 257-point rally the day after the election), and the net wealth of Americans -- mostly through their pension funds -- has increased by more than $4 trillion.

Last month the University of Michigan, which tracks consumer sentiment, reported that confidence soared to near its highest level in at least a decade. Other surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Association of Manufacturers also find a flurry of optimism.

You hear these same sentiments anecdotally from employers. Everywhere I go I ask CEOs, "How is business?" The answer is almost always one of two words: "good" or "great." Optimism abounds. One construction executive told me recently, "It was like on Election Day a light switch was flicked on and our business started improving and it hasn't stopped."

Just a few months ago many economists were warning that the economy and the stock market were tapped out and that a recession and a stock market correction were overdue. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that slow growth was "the new normal" for America: The Obama brain trust could only squeeze out 2 percent growth from the American economy even in a good year, so there was no way Trump could do better.

I was one of the advisers during the campaign who urged Trump to aim for 3 to 4 percent growth unrelentingly. It was obvious that the economy wasn't running out of gas, but just the opposite. The post-Great Recession recovery was running $2 trillion behind an average recovery and $3 trillion below the trend line from the pace of the Reagan expansion.

Liberals have taken note of the economic revival and are scrambling to invent plausible explanations without having to -- God forbid -- assign any credit to Trump. The latest spin is that this is the "Janet Yellen economy" driven by the Fed's low interest-rate policies.

But if the Fed's zero-interest-rate policies of the last eight years (2009-2016) are the engine for growth, why did the spurt only start happening once Trump was on the scene?

The Trump presidency has ended what economist Larry Kudlow calls Washington D.C.'s war against business. The Obama-era regulatory rampage has come to a screeching halt. Some 16 Obama-era regulations have been suspended so far. A notable dividend from these policies is the improbable comeback in coal. After being declared a dead industry by liberals last year, coal production is up more than 12 percent this year -- which means not just more mining jobs but more hiring in trucking, steel and manufacturing as well. That's a microcosm of the Trump effect.

Again, these are short-term numbers, and business owners and the stock market are counting on the Trump tax cut, especially in the aftermath of the Obamacare repeal whiff. The lower corporate tax rate would mean trillions of dollars in higher stock values.

So far, eight months into his presidency, love him or hate him, Trump has shifted the economy and wealth creation into a faster gear. If Republicans -- and hopefully pro-business Democrats -- can pass a meaningful tax cut this fall, the Trump boom may just be getting started.

Missouri state senator who hoped for Trump assassination censured by her colleagues

JEFFERSON CITY • State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal faced her Senate colleagues on Wednesday for the first time since she hoped for the assassination of President Donald Trump in an August Facebook post.

The upper chamber voted overwhelmingly to censure the senator in what amounts to a formal reprimand. Majority Floor Leader Mike Kehoe, R-Jefferson City, said the censure was the first in Missouri Senate history.

"They understand that I have made a mistake," Chappelle-Nadal said of her constituents, in response to an inquiry from Sen. Bill Eigel, who asked why she won't resign. "I have to continue working to build that trust and do the hard work of the district."

The move to censure Chappelle-Nadal took about 15 minutes in a chamber that moves as slow as molasses some days.

It was the most eventful action of the Legislature's annual veto session, where Republicans chose not to override any of the legislation Republican Gov. Eric Greitens nixed this year.

Kehoe said the Senate could still choose to expel Chappelle-Nadal in the future if it chooses.

Missouri state senator who hoped for Trump assassination censured by her colleagues

JEFFERSON CITY • State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal faced her Senate colleagues on Wednesday for the first time since she hoped for the assassination of President Donald Trump in an August Facebook post.

a start but I hope its not the end - she needs to go now that she has demonstrated exactly what kind of person she is

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather when you have your foot firmly on the enemies neck